War, uncertainty, and fears about the economy: what else is new? Well, regardless of the bleak macroeconomic forecasts, TAO is showing newfound resilience even as the rest of crypto falters.

I spent the week in San Francisco (my first time in California) for Breakout, and saw first-hand the level of interest in Bittensor. Between panels, I was repeatedly ushered before builders, founders, and first-time fans, many of whom had only heard of Bittensor in the last two or three months. 

I haven’t seen this level of inbound interest in Bittensor since the dTAO launch a year ago. But much depends on how well we onboard new entrants: as miners, subnet owners, or even just as retail holders. Two individuals approached me asking where they should stake the $1m-plus of TAO they’d just bought (seriously), three others demo’d their platforms to see whether they’d work on Bittensor instead, and countless more simply poured their questions out.  

In-person events galvanise people. They make an ecosystem feel real, in a way that tweets and livestreams rarely achieve. If we held an event like this every month, in different cities around the world, the ripple effect could compound into something much, much bigger (jetlag notwithstanding).

@macrozack

Add this to the list of Bittensor’s decentralized alternative infrastructure: distributed bandwidth for data transmission. Reading SN105’s thread this week gave me IOTA vibes - dynamic load balancing, data parallelism, progressive chunk dispatch, all governed by an orchestrator that ‘transform[s] independent workers into a single high-performance transfer network.’ The team is yet to be doxx’d (but then how did they secure investment from Yuma?) so DYOR, but great to see another team take on hardware variance in distributed systems.

It’s been a real pleasure to bring Bittensor to the Bay Area. Following Exploit Summit’s postponement - scheduled for 28-29 September, Montreal - my team at Tensor Media Group worked at speed to develop and deliver Breakout, so that Bittensor could build its presence in San Francisco with two back-to-back events at Frontier Tower and at the Hyatt (three if you count Brunchtensor - which I most certainly do). Big up @SiliconJose for making it happen.

As much as it pains me to write this, Quasar did indeed get hacked for the second time in about three weeks. Investigations are ongoing, but here’s Const’s perspective, which is that this was a second exploit by the same hackers who drained the SN24 wallet the first time round. Accusations of complicity are unfounded - basically just ‘lightning doesn’t strike twice’ - but it seems that, once the vulnerability was established on a compromised machine, the hacker simply waited for the second coldkey transfer and promptly drained the wallet again. I received the news just after a 10-hour flight from SF to London, with a midnight phone call from Gus informing me that we needed to make a statement.